tech addict

This weekend I relocated myself and my servers to our temporary stomping grounds. Everything went without a hitch. Except of course for my main server, the trusty dual p3 800 machine that has hosted hasno for a long time. Luckily the drive array was not troubled by the loss of it's brainier compatriot. I picked up a nice new core2duo e6550 and mobo at a local store and had it up and running later in the day. Things are a lot speedier with current hardware. Rest in peace my 800mhz friend.

In addition to the server hardware troubles, my macbook's hard drive has yet again. This is my third hard drive failure. Hitatchi's 160gb sata drives are krud. The laptop itself is great, I just wish I didn't have the hard drive dying every 3-6mo. At least the server migration went through without data loss, I guess I'll just focus on the bright side of the weekend.

As a side note, cablevision can't and won't maintain static ip addresses through a move. So if your a business user hosting content at your office, expect longer downtime due to dns propagation and ip address setup snafus when moving. Make sure you have them unblock ports 80 and 25, since by default on all new ip setup they block them even if they were unblocked for your account previously.

It's my first foray into screen casting, hopefully people find it useful. I cover setting up a subversion repository, accessing the repository, putting things into the repository and some other items. I tried pushing this to Google video, but it consistently mangled the text. I'll give it a shot again once I have some time. Any feedback or requests are welcome.

For those of you with ipods, here's an ipod friendly version.

I've finally gotten around to rebuilding my windows vim install with the latest patches. I tested it on my work machine and laptop's vmware image. It's built with huge, ruby, python, perl, and IME (multibyte). The binaries are optimized for pentium4+ machines with SSE2. You can get the installer here.

Every time I have to document code or architecture in Word, I get upity. It's not that Word isn't good for creating documents, it is in fact great at creating nice looking documents. The problem is that code is a living creature, and word documents generally aren't. They are written and forgotten, filed away and lost. I generally envision the giant storage warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So like many other developers I push for documentation via wiki. Depending on your environment this may hard to accomplish. If your lucky enough to be using subversion for version control, then you can just setup trac. Trac just happens to provide everything one would need for a lively quick moving project, a wiki, subversion browser, ticket management, and wiki syntax linking them all. The wiki-ticket integration is great for impromptu code reviews. Not to mention the RSS feeds with links to changesets.

So far trac has been a hit at every place I've worked. It takes a culture change, but it's worth it. Give it a try if you haven't already. If your coming from in-house sharepoint and sourcesafe pairings, it'll be a refreshing change.

At work I end up using a Windows 2k3 machine for development. I have a personal svn repository setup for my projects, which I end up merging into vss (which is the suck). I tried installing Ankhsvn, an addin for visual studio enabling svn integration, and I tried rapidsvn. Both programs crashed due to some interaction with my system. Some googling brought back some stuff about the version of svn being a problem. That was wrong.

It turns out that the iconv libs provided with the svn install I used were not compatible with the other apps. Not sure why. I noticed this when I checked out the app with Process Explorer and saw APR_ICONV_PATH=c:\program files\subversion\iconv. Once I saw that I tried the debug build of svn from tigris and everything started working except the old subversion bins. Anyway, if you run into a null pointer error (exception) stemming from libapriconv.dll or libapriconv-1.dll, try replacing the subversion bins and libs.

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My poor little macbook is once again in the throws of hard drive failure. I returned from lunch and attempted to unlock the screensaver, to find that bringing up the login dialog took ~2 minutes. The only large processes running at the time were firefox and azureus on a machine with 2gb of ram. When I was finally able to login, I noticed an error message from azureus regarding failed writes. At that point, I craned my head towards where the hard drive was located. That tell-tale click-grind-whir noise was repeating softly above the fan noise. I figure, I have maybe a day before this thing kraps itself. Time to make a backup and start calling Apple. Unfortunately this always seems to happen when I am about to travel somewhere. I love this little laptop more than my old pb 12", which was a great little machine. Hopefully apple will just replace it at this point, since I've had it less than one year and have had the hd logic board and fan fail before this.

<update>

I've spoke with apple yesterday, and the tech was adamant about me running DiskUtility's verify. I didn't want to do that before attempting to backup the latest changes to the machine. I do have a backup from 3 weeks ago, but it's missing a vm that I would like to have. So I left the machine attempting to copy that vm and a few other files overnight. When I woke up ~6hrs later, it was still "working", but the UI was not responsive. So I turned if off and on again (The IT Crowd...). The wonderful missing OS screen was what I got in return.

I contacted apple this morning and was told that since the part hadn't failed 3 times, I couldn't just get a laptop replacement. This means that to date I have had 16 days of downtime with this laptop due to hardware issues. Let's assume that it will take 5 days to get me the new part. I think that's a fair assumption since it's Thursday. That will mean 21 days with out the laptop, in less than one year. Let's figure out what the availability of the laptop is. Google tells me that 1 month = 30.4368499 days. Ok, so I've had it since January, so that's 9 months or 273 days. So it seems like I have been with out the laptop 7.69% of the time since I got it. Great, so conversely it's been functional 92.31% of the time. This only ever happens before I travel, it's like the macbook is protesting.

</update>

I took a moment yesterday and tooled around with my apache setup in order to get dav svn up. Directory listing is currently denied as I have projects in there that aren't public. The SVNListParentPath directive doesn't seem to operate properly unless I grant read to /, which then exposes the file structure of everything in the repository. The actual files can't be read as Authz is setup and actually kicks in when you try to access the files past the first level of a project ( say /mystuff/a_file ). My searches on the subject haven't been very enlightening, if anyone's dealt with a similar setup I'd appreciate any tips. This was primarily motivated by experiences with web-only proxies at some sites.

That all being said, here's a list of the trees currently:

• http://svn.hasno.info/ruby-hl7 is the hl7 tree
• http://svn.hasno.info/mephisto is my mephisto trunk and mephisto plugins
• http://svn.hasno.info/fastxml my little hpricot-like libxml library

I was just looking into registering my wife's car in CT and I noticed that the CT DMV provides podcasts. It's great to see government agencies adopting new technologies, but I have to wonder if they mimic the live dmv service experience. Maybe the podcasts start with a long silent pause. Regardless, kudos to those involved.

The change has been good overall. The bandwidth provided by Cablevision (5mb up/ 30mb down) is much better than that of AT&T (512kb up/ 6mb down) for about the same price with static ip's. I did run into a few annoyances, first being that they couldn't tell me what the IP range was going to be before they installed. That was one of the items I made sure to ask the salesperson before signing up. The second item has to do with the actual setup. It took ~10hrs for them to handle their stuff so that I could actually use the service to host anything. This was due to the fact that the installer didn't actually setup the little cisco router properly (it was doing NAT instead of routing). All said and done, I'm satisfied with the actual network, even if I'm not too keen on the support. We'll see if there are any outages, the DSL line went out once over the course of 3 years for some reason I don't think cable will be as reliable.

For the last 3 years I've hosted this site off of a dsl line from ATT. The local cable provider has finally rolled out a static ip package with 30M down and 5M up, so I'm switching providers tomorrow. Hopefully this will be a smooth transition (we'll see how quickly DNS propagates). I'll report back regarding the service, but I expect it to be good. In addition to that dsl line, I've had a cable modem for house-hold inet access from the same provider. Now all I need is some Cisco hardware that supports MPLS and I'll be a happy camper. That and a new main server, as the dual p3-800 box is showing it's age. In other news, fastxml is coming along. I'm hoping to have it act as a drop in replacement for hpricot in my feed parsing library. After that I'll see If I can make it play nice with mechanize.

I've recently purchased a Motorola Razr v3xxx (did they really need all those x's?) in order to get access to 3g wireless. I'm coming from a Razr v3, so the interface is familiar, and the phone seems fine. Except of course for the crashing. Anything involving data transfer will eventually cause this thing to crash. Hard, as in the softkeys no longer respond to anything. The only resolution is to pull the battery. If that weren't enough, this has unearthed an issue with pppd on my macbook.

Apparently the osx is none too fond of bluetooth devices disappearing. The ppp daemon sits in a perpetual "Disconnecting" state. Killing the process results in a zombie. I'm not certain what the Internet Connection tool checks to find the current status of the bluetooth connection, but it is inextricably linked to the pppd process which is itself stuck. At this point this requires me to reboot the macbook in order to reconnect to the net.

I wonder if anyone else has run into this pair of issues, then again this may be one of those ultra niche things. How many people could there be using bluetooth to ride their phone's network connection?

Since Bram has release Vim 7.1, I've rebuilt my windows vim install. It's built with huge, ruby, python, perl, and IME (multibyte). The binaries are optimized for pentium4+ machines with SSE2. You can get the installer here.

So I've started looking at IIS 7 today and low and behold they've finally done away with the damned metabase and have replaced it with some xml configuration files. It'll be nice to actually be able to diff webserver configs. At some point I hope to play around with some of the newer alternative http servers on the scene, like nginix. At this moment though, I'm checking out what's changing in the windows world. Also whilst poking around Vista I've also noticed that they made the firewall not suck. Kudos, Vista does indeed look like a nice step forward though I can understand why people's responses seem to be mixed. Change is indeed rough. I don't think it helps that all of the previous releases worked very hard to provide a familiar operating environment. At some point it pays to be more like the linux kernel developers, natural api evolution seems to lead to cleaner stuff.

So after establishing that my harddrive was indeed dead and dying, I called AppleCare. Until yesterday there had been no negative AppleCare experiences on my part. I had heard some horror stories from others but had never experienced such a blunder. Let's establish some facts here. My macbook is not stock, it has a 160gb drive and 2gb of ram. Those are considered custom upgrades, and this information is attached to my serial number supposedly. So when calling, after providing my serial number, I assume that a person would check to see if the harddrive in question was availible at the applestore they were directing me to. That didn't happen, and we drove over an hour out of our way to be told "Sorry we don't have that here, we could order it or take the laptop and get it back to you". To be fair, every person we talked to was very friendly and helpful. On the flip side, taking a half day from work and driving around to get nothing done right before traveling is not my idea of a good time.

I was understandably angry at this point and decided to spread the love in apple's general direction. The woman I spoke to was very nice and helpful. She informed me that no applestore would have my drive because it was custom. Apparently they do keep a stockpile of parts on hand, but generally not for the custom configurations. Excellent. I'd spent a good part of my day trying to do something that was not possible at the onset.

At this point they are sending me another harddrive, which may or may not arrive before I have to travel again. On the bright side, my bitching got me a $60 gift certificate to the online applestore. The only downside to that, is the fact that we picked up a power adapter from the store before leaving and the certificate can not be used at a brick and mortar store. Good times.

<update>It should be noted that I did mention that I had a 160gb drive and that I wanted to find out where I could get a new drive today if it was possible. I'd call that along with my serial number enough information to provide accurate information. At this point I still have not received the certificate email either. I have received an email for a customer relations survey.</update>